Mike Harden commentary: Quirky exhibits beckon for lesson

Sunday

Nov 30, 2008 at 12:01 AMNov 30, 2008 at 11:04 AM

LIMA, Ohio -- At a juncture in our national economic life when bank presidents seem to be doing more to destroy their institutions than bank robbers, I decided that a visit to John Dillinger might be in order.

LIMA, Ohio -- At a juncture in our national economic life when bank presidents seem to be doing more to destroy their institutions than bank robbers, I decided that a visit to John Dillinger might be in order.

Dillinger, the Depression-era desperado whose felonious feats grabbed headlines nationwide, has been dead almost 75 years. Yet, his spirit and his Madame Tussauds likeness live on within the confines of the Allen County Museum. It is here that he stands, fingers laced around the bars of his cell, waiting to be delivered from the slammer by interloping partners in crime.

On the other side of the bars, Allen County Sheriff Jess Sarber sits reading the day's newspaper, cucumber calm in his naive notion that one of the nation's top public enemies has met his Waterloo.

When three of Dillinger's running buddies strolled into the sheriff's office on the night of Oct. 12, 1933, claiming to be detectives from Indiana, Sarber asked to see credentials. In the ensuing gunfire, the sheriff was mortally wounded and Dillinger was freed.

Let the Smithsonian Institutions of this land paint history with broad thematic brushstrokes. I'm partial to the quirky, out-of-the-way museums whose artifacts tell tales more anecdotally fascinating.

Not far from the Dillinger exhibit, the Allen County Museum houses a few of the more curious creations of Lima's James Grosjean. Undertaker, taxidermist, shoe salesman and inveterate tinkerer, Grosjean -- when he wasn't fitting folks for penny loafers or coffins -- created an elaborate animated display of Noah's Ark. Chains, belts, levers and gears whir as the ark, aground on Mount Ararat, disgorges pairs of animals like clowns from a circus car.

As the Old Testament story plays out, a pair of stone doors yawn to reveal Noah's freshly disembarked family torching a sacrifice to the Almighty. Museum volunteer Joe Dunkle said that children, confounded by the representation of livestock set afire, are sometimes told the scene merely depicts a barbecue.

The museum boasts rooms full of artifacts more conventional in nature, but I don't go to museums to see Conestoga wagons, 19th-century farm implements or the ubiquitous general store of yesteryear. I want something a little bizarre around the edges; something like the museum's showcase of an estimated 200 foreign objects that physicians removed from the gullets of local patients.

Affixed inside a glass case as though they were exotic butterflies, the half-swallowed keys, safety pins, buttons, dentures and coins of various denomination were donated by a pair of doctors.

Someone at the museum apparently recognized early on that for an exhibit to appeal to both stuffed shirts and elementary-school field trips, it must embrace equal parts of history and a chain-reaction crash on the freeway.

History, Lenin once said, does not move in a straight line, but in zigs and zags. In Allen County, it takes a few predictable zigs and a few amazing zags.